Moonvale Welcomes You

Jo had grown up in cities. She had navigated restaurant kitchens, which were political ecosystems of considerable complexity, and she understood the dynamics of small closed communities in the way of someone who had survived the pastry chef hierarchy of three different establishments. She understood that small towns had their own topology — the same currents of affiliation and rivalry, just mapped onto fewer people, which made the currents faster and the consequences more immediate.

She decided to be bad at things.

This was a deliberate strategy. People explained things to competent-looking strangers; they showed things to helpless ones. She drove to the Moonvale general store the morning after the cellar discovery and bought coffee in a paper cup and looked confused about which road went to the center of town, even though she had already been to the center of town twice.

The woman who corrected her directions was named Bev. Bev was sixty-five, wore a quilted vest, and had opinions about the road situation that unfolded over the next fifteen minutes while Jo nodded and sipped her coffee and learned: that the main road had been disputed for a rezoning for three years, that the rezoning was connected to a development project, that the development project had been proposed by a man named Reg Aldous who had bought several parcels on the east side of town in the last four years, and that there were people in Moonvale who were very much in favor of this development and people who were very much not, and that Tom Fielding, God rest him, had been vocal about his opposition, which was his right as a thirty-year resident even if Reg Aldous didn't appreciate it.

Jo said that was such a shame about Tom, and Bev agreed it was a terrible shame, and Jo said it was so sad he'd had an accident, and the pause before Bev agreed was about half a second longer than it should have been.

She walked the town that day.

Moonvale was the kind of Vermont town that had survived the twentieth century through a combination of agriculture, a small ski mountain forty minutes away, and the stubborn attachment of its residents. The main street had a diner, a hardware store, a library that looked like it had been a church, and Diane's real estate office with a hand-lettered sign in the window: Moonvale Properties — Diane Kessler, Your Local Expert. Jo noted, as she passed, that the properties listed in the window included three of the parcels on the east side of town and that the contact information on the listings, in the small print at the bottom, included a second name alongside Diane's: R. Aldous.

She stopped at the library.

The librarian's name was Pearl, and she was the kind of small-town librarian who had made an art form of the horizontal file — three decades of local history sorted into a system that required Pearl to retrieve anything, because the system was Pearl. Jo said she was thinking of renovating the inn and staying on, which was not true but had the advantage of being the kind of thing a local librarian would find reasons to encourage.

Pearl found extensive reasons. She brought out two binders of historical photographs of the inn, a folder on the property's assessment history, and, when Jo mentioned that she was curious about the development projects she'd seen in the real estate window, a clipping file on the east-side rezoning that went back to the initial proposal hearing.

Jo read through the clippings carefully while Pearl reshelved things around her.

The development project was called Moonvale Commons. It proposed converting a five-parcel area of east-side land into a mixed-use residential and commercial development — sixty units, a boutique hotel, a spa. The proposal had been filed three years ago by Aldous Development LLC. It had been opposed at every town meeting by the same small group of residents, and the opposition had been led, consistently, by Margot Bellamy and Tom Fielding.

Margot had filed three formal objections. The third had been filed eight weeks ago, two weeks before her death.

"Did you know my aunt well?" Jo asked Pearl.

Pearl came back to the table with the expression of someone deciding how honest to be.

"Margot was one of the sharpest people in Moonvale," she said. "She had opinions, and she had the evidence to back them up, and she was not afraid to say so in public." She paused. "She was concerned that the development project was not what it appeared to be. She spent a lot of time in here, in the last year. Using the land records, the county filing system." Another pause. "She told me once that she thought she understood what was actually happening but didn't have enough to prove it yet."

"What did she think was happening?"

Pearl sat down across from Jo and looked at her the way librarians look at people they have decided to trust.

"She thought the parcels were being assembled for something larger than what was on the proposal," she said. "She thought the hotel and the spa were a cover story. She thought whoever was behind the development — she was not certain it was Aldous, or not only Aldous — wanted the east-side land for something else entirely." She folded her hands. "She was particularly interested in a piece of land called the Sutter parcel, which is one of the five. It's the only one that didn't sell. The current owner refused. Your aunt was trying to find out what was on the Sutter parcel that made it worth buying all the others around it."

"Who owns the Sutter parcel?"

"A man named Gerald Finch," Pearl said. "He's been in Moonvale forty years. He and your aunt were friends, in the last months. He came in twice with her." She paused. "He hasn't been seen since your aunt's funeral."

Jo looked at the clipping file in front of her.

She thought about the list in the journal with names and future dates. She thought about Hatcher's photograph in her aunt's envelope.

She thought about the honey cardamom rolls, still cooling on the rack at the inn, which she had made in excess and had no obvious way to distribute.

"Pearl," she said, "would you like some rolls? I made too many. And I'd love to get your read on the rest of these records over tea, if you have time."

Pearl's expression warmed in the specific way of someone who recognizes a fellow researcher recognizing them.

"I have time after three," she said. "And I have things in the closed stacks Margot asked me to hold for her."

She reached under the desk and produced a folder she had apparently been waiting to give to someone.

It had Jo's name on the front, in her aunt's handwriting.